119 GB

The way I do these recordings is kind of weird on a few levels. For one thing I record the gameplay and pulse graph separately, combining them later so that I can change the placement and size of the graph after the fact, but I also keep the original recordings (but all muxed into a single mkv file). The thing is I record at such high bitrates that this adds up to far bigger files than are needed, and I keep them for recreating the video later, if needed.
For the FEAR videos alone, I have a total 119 GB of these archive files. The final videos that get uploaded to YouTube are just 24.2 GB, for comparison. As I do not have unlimited storage, I've come up with a plan I think will work.


There are two reasons I record at the high bitrates I do. One is to make sure the videos are high quality. The other is because I am using hardware encoders, which are able to record videos very quickly, but are less bit-efficient than software encoders. So my solution is to re-encode the original videos with FFmpeg, which will do so more intelligently than the hardware encoders, but have the bitrate caped at that of the original files, so it does not waste data. (I have seen encoders try to use a higher bitrate than the source file, so this is to prevent that.)
So far from what I have seen, it can cut the bitrates in half, or more, seriously cutting down on file size, without noticeably affecting video quality. Even if the video quality is lower than that of the original videos, the settings are still much higher than what gets uploaded, so this should not impact any videos I may have to re-encode in the future. (I don't know why I might need to re-encode any of these videos after uploading them, but better safe than sorry.)
Anyway, I felt like sharing that if only because 119 GB is a lot of storage space for just one of these series.